“In this competition,” Cannes jury president Nanni Moretti said after awarding Amour the Palme D’or in 2012, “the filmmakers seemed more in love with their style than with their characters.” This, it was widely felt, was Moretti’s thinly veiled explanation for leaving Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, strongly favored during the festival to claim the top prize, without any award at all. It’s only been three years, but history has already proven Moretti wrong. Holy Motors is a dazzling film, and perhaps its radical sprawl was too much to take in amid the mad rush of Cannes. But from the present vantage, it seems clear that the film is no mere exercise in style. Carax confronts film’s demise with an intensity that in its own way fights valiantly against it, acknowledging the medium’s obsolescence while inarguably proving its worth. In part, that means adopting the language of new media: the fractured, drip-feed format of the YouTube video, flipped through like channel surfing, always poised to deliver another fix. At first blush, Holy Motors seems like a film with an identity crisis—a family drama one moment, a murder-mystery the next. On their own, the vignettes are sublime, each in turn an exhilarating bout of pure cinema. (A mid-film plunge into accordion-led rock opera, in particular, is among the most purely delightful sequences in recent film history.) But the cumulative effect is what counts. Death hangs over these proceedings, however occasionally ecstatic the register. It’s apparent from an early shot of an audience of corpses in the cinema that Holy Motors is concerned with the death of film. What emerges by the end is a deeper fixation: the death of us all. Mortality has never before been reckoned with so vigorously. —Calum Marsh
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